Sunday, April 9, 2017

F1 2017 Chinese Grand Prix - Battlemaps

Some battlemaps to show how the race evolved from the perspective of some of the drivers...

But first, the race overall... How were the cars placed on track at the end of each lap? (Numbers in circles are number of laps behind for a lapped car). The + denotes the track position of BOT.


The race from Hamilton's perspective:


Here's how Vettel saw it:


Verstappen's race:

And Ricciardo:

How did Raikkonen fare?

And what about Bottas?














4 comments:

  1. These battlemaps are the best way to visualize someone's race I've seen yet. I especially like that lapped traffic is included. Perhaps you could add ticks for every 5 laps on the x-axis instead of 20, making it easier to look up the driver's pace in the interesting looking laps.

    Speaking of which, I would find comparison graphs with raw laptimes colored/shaded by availability of free air ahead interesting. Someone 1 sec ahead and it's almost transparent, 2s and it's 50% opaque, 4s and up completely solid. It would say a lot about a drivers' race pace.

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  2. Thanks for the comment - noted re the ticks (I was trying to minimise clutter on the chart.

    The laptime coloured by free air ahead is a nice idea - a heatmap would be one way of doing this I think?

    I also need to address pitstops - maybe a dashed line showing pit lap on the battlemap for when that driver pits. Also, I was thinking of a "pit window" map that shows the cars 15-25 seconds behind

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  3. I haven't considered a heatmap but now that you mention it's a brilliant idea. Color coding could be something like hue = laptime, saturation = free air ahead. The range of laptimes might be too big to be fitted into the range of hues in a way that you can still pick up differences of a few tenths, but if we transform laptimes a bit it could be possible.

    I can't resist getting my hands on a dataset to try this out!

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  4. Old example of heatmap here: http://www.f1datajunkie.com/2011/09/f1-2011-belgium-lap-time-heat-map.html
    You can get data from ergast API, or via data download from eragst - eg http://www.f1datajunkie.com/2017/04/a-homebrew-ergast-f1-data-science.html

    ReplyDelete

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